NEW YORK — When he decided to start a rock group and do so seriously, Theo Spielberg found a
lead singer across the hallway at home.

Joined in his bedroom by sister Sasha, he grabbed his guitar and plunked a chord progression he
had practiced since college; Sasha, meanwhile, sang a pleading and melodic vocal about unspecified
desires.

The creation of the song,
Opossum — which brought them national exposure and the backing of a major music company —
played out so rapidly that, three years later, the siblings, who call their band Wardell, remain
half-astounded and half-

embarrassed to talk about it.

“It happened really quickly — like, in an hour,” Sasha Spielberg said recently, sitting next to
her brother in the Manhattan offices of Roc

Nation, the company that manages their band.

Compared with their easy start, Theo Spielberg said, all their work since “has been pretty much
a struggle.”

This is a familiar rite of passage for fledgling bands such as Wardell, but they take on outsize
significance for the Spielbergs because of their name.

They are children of Steven Spielberg, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and producer, and his
wife, actress Kate Capshaw — facts they can’t deny or explain away.

They are exuberant, earnest and unknowing, for all that is good and bad about those
qualities.

But in indie rock — a self-scrutinizing milieu in which lineage is as important as sound and any
hints of privilege are rooted out like weeds — it remains unclear where Wardell might fit in.

“I would say a lot of music journalists aren’t taking them too seriously right now,” said
Christopher R. Weingarten, a senior editor at
Spin magazine — not because “They’re children of a billionaire,” he said, but because “The
sounds they’re mining were the flavor of the month, in our world, two years ago.”

Even so, Weingarten said, “There’s clearly an audience for this, and these guys are rising at a
perfect time.”

Although the siblings had played around at performing together, they say they didn’t become
serious about being a band until 2010 and didn’t feel ready to play live shows until last year.

The timetable accelerated when
Opossum brought the band to the attention of Roc Nation. (Roc Nation declined to comment
for this story.) Wardell made its South by Southwest debut in March; released an EP,
Brother/Sister; and is booked by the same agency that handles rising stars Lorde and
Passion Pit.

Theo Spielberg said these achievements were “just very fortuitous” and “had nothing to do with
our parents.”

But Jessica Hopper, a critic in Chicago and music editor of
Rookie magazine, is skeptical that the Spielbergs made it all on their own.

“It doesn’t quite match up with the fact that they are a brand-new band that no one ever heard
of,” Hopper said.

Weingarten of
Spin said bands such as Wardell don’t fit a particular genre but rather belong in the
category of “post-everything Internet pop,” which he explained is not necessarily a bad thing.

“They don’t have any qualms about picking and choosing the things they like,” he said. “It’s
done in this natural way of, like, ‘This is music we listen to, and it’s all on my iTunes.’”